A couple of weeks ago a brand-new ALDI opened in our town, and if you’ve read our previous series on ALDI, you’ll know that it’s our favorite grocery store–you might even call us ALDI superfans. 🙂

Disappointingly, we were out of town the on the day of the grand opening, or else we totally would have been there. ALDI pulled out all the stops! They were giving out “Golden Tickets” to the first 100 customers worth up to $100. There was a drawing where the lucky winner could win a full year of free groceries. They had free samples (ALDI never has samples!) and even were giving out free ALDI eco-friendly shopping bags! Forget lining up for Black Friday or new iPhones, we might’ve been willing to camp out overnight for this! [Read more…]

So far in this series that began with the question of the morality of investing in mutual funds, we’ve been dealing with principles. (You can review part 1 and part 2 of the series to get caught up on all that has been discussed so far.) It’s now time to start applying those principles practically.

In our last post we came up with an investment filter that can help evaluate the desirability of any given investment. Using this filter, I’ve created a quick at-a-glance scorecard for each investment below. While the criteria themselves can be helpful for anyone, not everyone may score them exactly the same. So let’s take a closer look at how I’m approaching these criteria before getting to the exact investments. [Read more…]

In our previous post, we evaluated the question of whether by investing in mutual funds, we would be complicit in and culpable for the immoral activities of businesses held within the funds.

From Scripture, the principle we discovered was that God does not hold us responsible for the evil that may occur through our indirect associations when we go about accomplishing the good that we should be doing—in fact, that’s a standard that God Himself cannot meet since He’s the one who sends the sunshine and rain upon both the good and evildoer. Paul adds that the only way for us to reach that level of moral purity would be for us to leave the world entirely—something we certainly hope to do someday, but not an option currently.

Getting Ahead of Ourselves

Not long ago, after listening to an acquaintance explain how he simply doesn’t feel right investing in mutual funds for this reason, he immediately tried to sell me animatedly on the latest cryptocurrency (because Bitcoin is so passé) that he predicted would go “boom” in the next few months. He projected being set for retirement after that. Others have tried to assuage their conscience by trying to convince me that trading currencies was the morally superior way to mutual funds, and yet others thought trading individual stocks or options was the answer.

I have found it strange how these apparently well-meaning and conscientious individuals would strain at the gnat of mutual funds due to their “contamination” by incidental contact with immoral businesses, while swallowing the camel of ignoring other very basic and common sense principles when it comes to investing. Somehow, they’ve made the rule of morally pure indirect associations of such magnitude that it outweighs any and all other considerations.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, because there are more principles than one to consider when thinking about investing. Let’s take a look at some of them now in our evaluation of appropriate investments for the Christian. [Read more…]

The morality of mutual funds is a common question that has been asked by many conscientious Christian believers who want to invest their talents as faithful stewards of God’s resources but also want to have a clear conscience about not being complicit in any immoral activity.

“Isn’t it wrong to invest in immoral businesses?” they ask. “Therefore, wouldn’t it also be wrong to invest in mutual funds or index funds that contain immoral businesses?”

For example, if it’s wrong to buy stock directly in Anheuser-Busch (maker of Budweiser beer), wouldn’t it be wrong to buy a mutual fund or index fund that has Anheuser-Busch as one of its holdings?

It’s an important topic and one that deserves some careful attention. (Caution: This turned out to be a rather long post!) [Read more…]

Yes, we haven’t posted here in a while and the reason is because we’ve been overseas traveling for most of the past month. Not to mention we got sick (yes, all three of us!) along the way and are still recovering from it.

Out of the four suitcases that we packed along with us, the baby’s stuff took up the greater part of three of them, so what are some things that we were immensely glad we’d brought and what did we wish we could have squeezed in? (Naturally, there are the typical things like clothes, bibs, diapers, wipes, etc. that are obvious, so we’re focusing on stuff that may not typically be considered essential.) [Read more…]

How do I know? I think His crumb-saving creds were most clearly demonstrated in the feeding of the 5000. The story is recorded in Matthew 14, Mark 6, and John 6.

In summary, a huge mass of people numbering 5000 men, plus women and children besides, thronged to hear Him speak. It was getting late, everyone was getting hungry, but instead of sending everyone away to get their own food, Jesus asked His disciples to feed them. They found a boy with 5 barley loaves and 2 small fishes willing to surrender his lunch. Jesus proceeded to bless the food and multiplied it until everyone in whole crowd had eaten their fill. Then He told His disciples to “gather up the fragments” and they ended up with 12 basketfuls of leftovers for people to take home! Talk about saving the crumbs!

I think there are some practical life lessons on economy and frugal-living that we can learn from this story. [Read more…]

Besides lamenting how our baby girl is growing too fast, we’re also reflecting a little bit on the complete upheavals our lives have taken this past year. Here’s a quick list of some things that we’ve discovered along the way. Some of these are just revelations about ourselves, some may or may not have anything to do with money and finances, but these all tell us what is truly important in life. [Read more…]

Remember, O Stranger! Arithmetic is the first of the sciences and the mother of safety.” – Louis D. Brandeis (probably quoting Sophocles)

I was a high school math teacher for a couple of years, and it seemed that every couple of months some unmotivated student (usually a slovenly and unkempt jokester slouching in the back of the classroom) would complain with the question, “When are we ever going to use this in real life?!” The more I’ve dabbled in the realm of personal finance in recent years, the more the answer to that question is: “All the time!”

In fact, I believe that a great deal of self-destructive personal finance decisions are made simply because people have become so bad at math—or at least they’ve become too lazy to apply what they should have learned in math class. So in our post today, I present to you a quick list of 15 ways to know if you’re bad at math, so to avoid being “a victim of the relentless rules of humble arithmetic”.* [Read more…]

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Meet Deb & Al

She's a bargain hunter and he's a numbers nerd. Together we're a husband and wife team who believe that by living an intentionally frugal life, the door flings open to a truly fulfilled existence. Read More…

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